For the life of me I can’t understand why the fact that acting health minister Mmamoloko Kubayi is not a medical doctor is an issue. Yet perfectly sensible people are running about complaining that this is some kind of madness. Why?
Broadcaster Eusebius McKaiser recently told of his experience where he tested positive for Covid-19. His doctor prescribed a course of ivermectin and by the time McKaiser had recovered in hospital from full-blown Covid pneumonia, his doctor still hadn’t called to check up on him.
Qualified doctors are just as stupid as the rest of us. They’re conspiracy theorists, thieves, second-rate, prejudiced, heavy drinkers, great company, nice to animals and worry about their children. Kubayi, who is not a doctor at all, seems to be doing perfectly fine acting in place of Zweli Mkhize, who President Cyril Ramaphosa isn’t quite sure yet whether or not to fire after being found with his hands firmly in the vaults of the health department.
Not that acting as, or actually being, the health minister in this government should be that taxing. Your officials tell you what’s going on and you more or less repeat it on television. And if you’re acting and lose your nerve about something, why, call your GP, though perhaps first find out from McKaiser who his is.
What we need is a cabinet of people not filled with expertise (how does any politician become an expert in shipping container software?) so much as a sense of urgency. And a president able to see that they do their jobs.
I say this because it seems, if you read the media, that Ramaphosa is about to reshuffle his cabinet. It’s assumed his “intelligence” cluster ministers will go, as will other nonperformers like, well, all of them. What we’ll get, I’m afraid, is another disappointment. The gallery the president plays to is his party, not the country.
And in the event we do get some surprises, don’t get too excited. No event, cataclysm or circumstance, not even a new finance minister, is going to change the policy path Ramaphosa is on. He spent two years consulting all the social partners, ignored the spirit of almost everything business had to say, and then he and a close band of ministers set out to do what they intended in the first place.
Ramaphosa calls it reform. But that’s on paper only, and there’s a lot of coercion about. Things like hiking embedded power generation by the private sector from 1MW to 100MW are accidents. Had his energy minister, Gwede Mantashe, suggested 35MW instead of just 10MW as a “reform” we would probably have stuck there.
And while the president is rightly credited with reloading key institutions with people of integrity — think the SA Revenue Service and the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) — he also hobbles them at rebirth by tolerating in office the most wretched leadership in the police, who need to investigate crimes for the NPA to prosecute in the first place.
So what’s the point of the forthcoming reshuffle? Not much. Ramaphosa will appoint more loyalists, but there’s no reason to suppose outcomes will improve. That’s because our core problem isn’t corruption or incompetence, though they are the moving parts of the neon sign at the entrance to SA. The problem is plain poor policy and the ANC’s absolute inability to understand how to turn one rand into two rand. It just can’t do it. It’s too hard.
Corruption thrives in plenty of successful economies — Thailand, China and Italy, to name a few. But the Chinese, the Thais and the Italians all chase growth. We chase transformation or reducing inequality at the expense of growth or arguing that growth wouldn’t fix them. “Corruption doesn’t lead to poverty and the kind of misery South Africans suffer,” says a friend. “Very bad economic policies do.”
My friend is right. The ANC is still stuck in the rhetoric and ideology of struggle and has yet to understand the extent to which it is now the enemy of the people. Perhaps the July violence will have helped make that clearer. SA, as RW Johnson often says, can have an industrial economy or an ANC government. It can’t have both.
It may all be too late for growth anyway. We are running just to stand still, says my colleague, economics writer Claire Bisseker. Luckily, we are in the throes of an old-fashioned commodities boom that has saved the fiscus and is paying welfare for people driven out of jobs by Covid-19, the violence and the looting.
It turns out that digging stuff out of the ground and sending it overseas is still a pretty good bet — something else for the ANC to stop ASAP. But this rescue will be followed by another SA special — a consumer boom, and then very little until the commodity cycle turns again.
But these are diminishing returns if we stay with current policies, no matter how well they’re implemented. There’s a broad assumption now that the introduction of a basic income grant is a foregone conclusion. We would then become the only place in the world to fund both a national minimum wage and maintain an entire country on welfare.
Quite a feat for a reformer president, but there are elections coming up and the voters need buying off.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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